BiblioVault - Books about Ages

The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule
Edited by Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris
University of Texas Press, 1995
Library of Congress PA4037.A59 1995 | Dewey Decimal 883.01

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have fascinated listeners and readers for over twenty-five centuries. In this volume of original essays, collected to honor the distinguished career of Emily T. Vermeule, thirty-four leading experts in Homeric studies and related fields provide up-to-date, multidisciplinary accounts of the most current issues in the study of Homer.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section treats the Bronze Age setting of the poems (around 1200 B.C.), using archaeological evidence to reveal how poetic memory preserves, distorts, and invents the past. The second section explores the early Iron Age, in which the poems were written (c. 800-500 B.C.), using the strategies of comparative philology and mythology, literary theory, historical linguistics, anthropology, and iconography to determine how the poems took shape. The final section traces the use of Homer for literary and artistic inspiration by classical Greece and Rome.

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Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages
Eugen Weber
Harvard University Press

Apocalyptic visions and prophecies from Zarathustra to yesterday form the luxuriant panorama in Eugen Weber's profound and elegant book. Beginning with the ancients of the West and the Orient and, especially, with those from whom we received our religions, the Jews and earliest Christians, Weber finds that an absolute belief in the end of time, when good would do final battle with evil, was omnipresent. Within centuries, apocalyptic beliefs inspired Crusades, scientific discoveries, works of art, voyages such as those of Columbus, rebellions and reforms. In the new world, American abolitionists, who were so critical to the movement to end slavery, believed in a final reckoning. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries' apocalyptic movements veered toward a lunatic fringe, and Weber rescues them from obloquy. From this more than two millennia history, he redresses the historical and religious amnesia that has consigned the study of apocalypses and millennial thought to the ash heap of thought and belief.

Weber, a master storyteller, turns detective in this latest book as he finds these alternative rationalities in the West, Asia, Africa, and South America. He writes with profound respect for the millennial pulse in history while never losing his urbane and witty style of writing. As we approach our second millennium beset by a host of apocalyptic predictions and cults, this book offers a map of understanding of the creeds we ignore at our peril.

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Branding Books Across the Ages: Strategies and Key Concepts in Literary Branding
Helleke van den Braber
Amsterdam University Press, 2021

As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.

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Children in Slavery through the Ages
Gwyn Campbell
Ohio University Press, 2009
Library of Congress HT861.C45 2009 | Dewey Decimal 306.36208309

Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas. Children in Slavery through the Ages examines the children among the enslaved across a significant range of earlier times and other places; its companion volume will examine the children enslaved in recent American contexts and in the contemporary/modern world.

This is the first collection to focus on children in slavery. These leading scholars bring our thinking about slaving and slavery to new levels of comprehensiveness and complexity. They further provide substantial historical depth to the abuse of children for sexual and labor purposes that has become a significant humanitarian concern of governments and private organizations around the world in recent decades.

The collected essays in Children in Slavery through the Ages fundamentally reconstruct our understanding of enslavement by exploring the often-ignored role of children in slavery and rejecting the tendency to narrowly equate slavery with the forced labor of adult males. The volume’s historical angle highlights many implications of child slavery by examining the variety of children’s roles—as manual laborers and domestic servants to court entertainers and eunuchs—and the worldwide regions in which the child slave trade existed.

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China: Visions through the Ages
Edited by Lisa C. Niziolek, Deborah A. Bekken and Gary M. Feinman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress DS714.C45 2017 | Dewey Decimal 931.007477311

At the entrance of The Field Museum’s Cyrus Tang Hall of China, two Chinese stone guardian lions stand tall, gazing down intently at approaching visitors. One lion’s paw rests upon a decorated ball symbolizing power, while the other lion cradles a cub. Traditionally believed to possess attributes of strength and protection, statues such as these once stood guard outside imperial buildings, temples, and wealthy homes in China. Now, centuries later, they guard this incredible permanent exhibition.

China’s long history is one of the richest and most complex in the known world, and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China offers visitors a wonderful, comprehensive survey of it through some 350 artifacts on display, spanning from the Paleolithic period to present day. Now, with China: Visions through the Ages, anyone can experience the marvels of this exhibition through the book’s beautifully designed and detailed pages. Readers will gain deeper insight into The Field Museum’s important East Asian collections, the exhibition development process, and research on key aspects of China’s fascinating history. This companion book, edited by the exhibition’s own curatorial team, takes readers even deeper into the wonders of the Cyrus Tang Hall of China and enables them to study more closely the objects and themes featured in the show. Mirroring the exhibition’s layout of five galleries, the volume is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; the second, the Bronze Age, the first dynasties, and early writing; the third, the imperial system and power; the fourth, religion and performance; and the fifth, interregional trade and the Silk Routes. Each section also includes highlights containing brief stories on objects or themes in the hall, such as the famous Lanting Xu rubbing.

With chapters from a diverse set of international authors providing greater context and historical background, China: Visions through the Ages is a richly illustrated volume that allows visitors, curious readers, and China scholars alike a chance to have an enduring exchange with the objects featured in the exhibition and with their multifaceted histories.

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Fe-Lines: French Cat Poems through the Ages
Collected and Translated by Norman Shapiro
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Library of Congress PQ1193.C38F45 2015 | Dewey Decimal 841

The French have long had a love affair with the cat, expressed through centuries of poetry portraying the animal's wit and wonder.

Norman R. Shapiro lionizes the feline's limitless allure in this one-of-a-kind collection. Spanning centuries and styles, he draws on she-cats and toms, and an honor roll of French poets, well known and lesser known, who have served as their devoted champions. He reveals the remarkable range of French cat poems, with most works presented here for the first time in English translation. Scrupulously devoted to evoking the meaning and music of the originals, Shapiro also respects the works' formal structures. Pairing Shapiro's translations with Olga Pastuchiv's elegant illustrations, Fe-Lines guides the reader through the marvels and inscrutabilities of the Mystique féline.

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Heiress of All the Ages: Sex and Sentiment in the Genteel Tradition
William Wasserstrom
University of Minnesota Press, 1959

Heiress of All the Ages was first published in 1959. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In a provocative study of American literature, Professor Wasserstrom reappraises the genteel tradition and its place in social and intellectual history. He shows that our image of this tradition has been inadequate, that most of our writers and critics have failed to recognize its profound effects.

Basing his discussion primarily on a study of the major novelists of the period from 1830 to the present, the author examines the role of women in fiction and defines some of our national attitudes toward love. He discusses especially the world of Henry James (from whose phrase "heir of all the ages" the title of this book is derived), William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edith Wharton, and Robert Penn Warren. He also considers such well known novelists of their day as Bret Harte, Edgar Fawcett, Robert Herrick, Henry B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and Gertrude Atherton. In addition, his study is based on source material of the period: diaries, recipe books, family magazines, early issues of sociology and psychology journals, and travel books.

This book will interest not only students of literature and history but also those in the general field of American civilization and sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relation of American literature to our mores.

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Mary Lincoln for the Ages
Jason Emerson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Library of Congress E457.25.L55E465 2018 | Dewey Decimal 973.7092

In this sweeping analytical bibliography, Jason Emerson goes beyond the few sources usually employed to contextualize Mary Lincoln’s life and thoroughly reexamines nearly every word ever written about her. In doing so, this book becomes the prime authority on Mary Lincoln, points researchers to key underused sources, reveals how views about her have evolved over the years, and sets the stage for new questions and debates about the themes and controversies that have defined her legacy.

Mary Lincoln for the Ages first articulates how reliance on limited sources has greatly restricted our understanding of the subject, evaluating their flaws and benefits and pointing out the shallowness of using the same texts to study her life. Emerson then presents more than four hundred bibliographical entries of nonfiction books and pamphlets, scholarly and popular articles, journalism, literature, and juvenilia. More than just listings of titles and publication dates, each entry includes Emerson’s deft analysis of these additional works on Mary Lincoln that should be used—but rarely have been—to better understand who she was during her life and why we see her as we do. The volume also includes rarely used illustrations, including some that have never before appeared in print.

A roadmap for a firmer, more complete grasp of Mary Lincoln’s place in the historical record, this is the first and only extensive, analytical bibliography of the subject. In highlighting hundreds of overlooked sources, Emerson changes the paradigm of Mary Lincoln’s legacy.

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Moral Conscience through the Ages: Fifth Century BCE to the Present
Richard Sorabji
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Library of Congress BJ1471.S64 2014 | Dewey Decimal 171.6

In Moral Conscience through the Ages, Richard Sorabji brings his erudition and philosophical acumen to bear on a fundamental question: what is conscience? Examining the ways we have conceived of that little voice in our heads—our self-directed judge—he teases out its most enduring elements, the aspects that have survived from the Greek playwrights in the fifth century BCE through St Paul, the Church Fathers, Catholics and Protestants, all the way to the 17th century’s political unrest and the critics and champions of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Sorabji examines an impressive breadth of topics: the longing for different kinds of freedom of conscience, the proper limits of freedom itself, protests at conscience’s being ‘terrorized,’ dilemmas of conscience, the value of conscience to human beings, its secularization, its reliability, and ways to improve it. These historical issues are alive today, with fresh concerns about topics such as conscientious objection, the force of conscience, or the balance between freedoms of conscience, religion, and speech. The result is a stunningly comprehensive look at a central component of our moral understanding.

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Rock of Ages, Sands of Time: Paintings by Barbara Page, Text by Warren Allmon
Barbara Page and Warren D. Allmon
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Library of Congress ND237.P1668A4 2001 | Dewey Decimal 759.13

Two tiny trilobites in a vast Cambrian ocean drift past sea cucumber parasols and a shaggy, tree-like sponge. Snail tracks loop enigmatically against brushed-gray Silurian slate, and ghostly white crinoids feather a Devonian seascape. A delicate pterosaur flies bravely into the Jurassic gloom, while a Tyrannosaurus rex so big that its teeth fill our field of vision stalks the deep orange sands that mark the end of the Cretaceous period.

These are just a few scenes from the magnificent drama that unfolds in glorious full color and three-dimensional texture in Rock of Ages, Sands of Time. Each of Barbara Page's 544 contiguous painted panels represents a million years of the history of life on earth, with fossil plants and animals depicted at the same scale and in association with each other just as they might be found by a paleontologist in the field. A muted rainbow of background colors evoke the rocks in which the fossils were found—the Texas Red Beds, for instance, or the yellow Solnhofen limestone—and keystone events are shown metaphorically, with fat rolls of paint marking major extinctions or continental drift.

To fully experience the awesome impact of an eon's worth of time spread across 500 feet of bas-relief panels, you'd have to visit the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, where Page's specially commissioned work will be installed when the museum opens in 2002. But this book is the next best thing. Not only does it contain crisp color reproductions of each painting, but it also includes an accessible essay from paleontologist Warren Allmon giving the scientific context behind the art.

For fossil lovers of all ages, and anyone interested in the merging of art and science, Rock of Ages, Sands of Time will be the find of a lifetime.

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Rock of Ages: Subcultural Religious Identity and Public Opinion among Young Evangelicals
Jeremiah J. Castle
Temple University Press, 2019
Library of Congress BR516.C38 2019 | Dewey Decimal 277.30830842

Evangelicals and Republicans have been powerful—and active—allies in American politics since the 1970s. But as public opinions have changed, are young evangelicals’ political identities and attitudes on key issues changing too? And if so, why? In Rock of Ages, Jeremiah Castle answers these questions to understand their important implications for American politics and society.

Castle develops his own theory of public opinion among young evangelicals to predict and explain their political attitudes and voting behavior. Relying on both survey data and his own interviews with evangelical college students, he shows that while some young evangelicals may be more liberal in their attitudes on some issues, most are just as firmly Republican, conservative, and pro-life on abortion as the previous generation.

Rock of Ages considers not only what makes young evangelicals different from the previous generation, but also what that means for both the church and American politics.

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Volcanoes: Encounters through the Ages
David M. Pyle
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017
Library of Congress QE522.P95 2017 | Dewey Decimal 551.2

Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood.

That’s Pliny the Younger, writing to Tacitus about the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, one of many volcanic eruptions that have become part of the story of human history. We have always, it seems, been simultaneously fascinated and terrified by volcanoes, and this book brings together an unforgettable selection of firsthand accounts from around the world and through the centuries.

In these pages, anonymous seventeenth-century seafarers tell of exploding islands, Alexander Von Humboldt and Charles Darwin show us volcanoes through the eyes of developing science, and artists sketch the spectacular London sunsets created by the eruption of Krakatoa, half the world away. As the years pass, words and paintings give way to the first photograph of an eruption, and eventually to detailed satellite imagery, but the awesome force of volcanoes still comes through, sublime and spectacular.
As we were reminded in 2010 when the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull snarled travel throughout Europe, volcanoes remain powerful and unpredictable even today. In the pages of this book, we can appreciate their majesty from a safe distance.

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